Success with 5G will come to those that participate in ecosystems

5G TECHNOLOGY is exciting because it’s something that benefits businesses more than it does the public.

For the first time, businesses are able to deploy the technology before telcos can make it available to the general population.

In China, for example, BMW worked with telcos China Unicom and China Mobile to deploy a private 5G network at its facility in the city of Shenyang — and now, plans are afoot to deploy 5G at BMW facilities across the globe.

At the recent Huawei Asia Pacific Innovation Day in Chengdu, China, the company and its partners, including China Mobile and GSMA, discussed 5G technology in vivid detail.

According to those present at the summit, the message was loud and clear — success with 5G technology will come to those that participate in ecosystems.

In BMW’s case, the company definitely partnered with telcos to deploy 5G at its facilities, but the automaker is expected to find other partners to form a reliable ecosystem to accelerate innovation as it attempts to race past competitors in the connected and autonomous car spaces.

Leaders of Huawei’s research and lab divisions said that they expect 5G-enabled enterprise applications to transform industries, and as a result, the lives of customers around the world.

Huawei alone has more than 50 5G commercial contracts lined up worldwide and has shipped more than 200,000 Massive MIMO Active Antenna Units (AAUs), showing strong interest in 5G technology from enterprises.

Truth be told, a lot of companies are already trialing 5G technology to understand how it can benefit them. From university campuses to corporate facilities, 5G lends itself well to a variety of use cases.

Of course, low latency and large bandwidth are great — but in the commercial sense, 5G is exciting because it enables a lot of other emerging technologies.

The internet of things (IoT), for instance, is something that experts always believed would take off with the arrival of 5G, especially when it comes to wide-scale deployments such as in smart cities and wildlife monitoring because of its low power consumption and more efficient use of sensor capabilities.

Further, 5G can help companies leverage sensors to transmit information from across the globe, in real-time, and feed it into another exciting technology — digital twins.

Digital twins help companies such as DHL, Scania, and Tetra Pak make smarter decisions, on the go, helping streamline, optimize, and transform various parts of an organization’s operations.

For a majority of enterprises, the benefits of participating in an ecosystem might not be apparent at first as they only see the need to work with a telco and/or a network equipment manufacturer at first.

However, once 5G has actually been deployed, companies will need to find solutions that help them make full use of their 5G environment — be it through new, more powerful hardware, or exciting software.

In a smart city, for example, regulators need 5G to connect all the disparate systems using sensors but they also need partners specializing in particular types of use cases to really make use of the data that is harvested and the infrastructure that is built.

Overall, 5G will create new opportunities for everyone involved. Collaborating will help accelerate the journey to success while avoiding partnerships could make it difficult to realize the full benefits offered by the revolutionary technology that is 5G.

In the coming weeks, companies are expected to talk about 5G ecosystems and announce partnerships with academic and government agencies as the world inches closer to making 5G a reality.